While many major U.S. cities experienced significant decreases in their murder rate in 2009, New Orleans posted a more modest drop, recording six fewer killings than in 2008.

The decrease in New Orleans follows a more significant reduction the year before, which saw murders fall from a post-Hurricane Katrina high of 210 killings in 2007 to 179 in 2008.

These drops are more consequential in New Orleans than in other cities, as they occurred while the city's population was steadily increasing -- meaning the per-capita murder rate fell more precipitously than the raw numbers suggest.

Even with those improvements, New Orleans will remain one of the nation's most murderous cities in 2009.

"The reduction of only six homicides is obviously a disappointment to everyone," said Peter Scharf, a Tulane University crime expert.

New Orleans Police Department leaders, who declined to comment for this article, have sought to highlight in recent weeks that, while the murder rate hasn't dropped dramatically, NOPD statistics show greater reductions of other violent crimes.

"I am the first one to admit we still have a crime problem," NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley said in a WWL-TV interview Thursday. "What we are simply saying over the last three years is that the trends are good; we are heading in the right direction."

Despite an economic downturn, violent crime and murder have dropped in many cities, sometimes to levels not seen for decades. In New York City and San Francisco, for example, murders are at levels that were common in the 1960s.

The FBI's statistics for the first half of 2009 showed a 4.4 percent nationwide drop in violent crime, while in the murder category, there was a 10 percent decline. In most cities, there are more homicides than those reported to the FBI, which tallies only killings categorized as murder and manslaughter. That method excludes deaths by negligence, such as car wrecks caused by drunken drivers, as well as homicides ruled justifiable by police.

Across the country, police chiefs are crediting strategies that target crime hot spots for reducing murder rates, including the use of data that allows police to target resources at the most dangerous neighborhoods.

While specific strategies could explain the drop in crime in some cities, said David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, there isn't some overarching trend to explain the nationwide decrease in murders.

"There are an awful lot more guns out there, but they're not leading to a whole lot of violent crime. The troubled economy is not making people into homicidal maniacs," he said. "All of which is extremely good news."

Last year, New Orleans had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country with 179 slayings, according to FBI data. Using the NOPD's population estimate for 2008, that amounted to 55 murders per 100,000 people. This year, with 173 murders, the city has a per-capita rate of 50 murders per 100,000, using the NOPD's population estimate of 342,694 people living in the city.

The cities with the next highest murder rates were St. Louis and Baltimore, which in 2008 had per-capita murder rates of 47 and 37, respectively.

This year, Baltimore actually had a few more murders than in 2008, while St. Louis recorded a decrease of more than 20 killings.

In New Orleans, the reduction in murders was mostly seen in the second half of the year, particularly the last three months. There were 23 murders in the last quarter of 2009, compared with 34 last year and 59 in 2007.

In an interview with WVUE-TV on Thursday, Riley referred to the reduction in murders as part of an overall trend in the city. All the major crime categories are down, with the exception of the 2009 rape statistics, he said.

For example, the NOPD's third-quarter statistics showed that assaults, which include non-fatal shootings, decreased by 12 percent compared with the same period in 2008. Assaults also went down significantly in 2008, dropping 22 percent from 2007.

Scharf has been skeptical of the steep decrease in assaults over the past couple of years, saying there are questions about whether police are counting every violent incident that did not end with a dead body in the street. As an example, he pointed to a news report from July showing that more than half the sexual-assault complaints brought to the NOPD in 2008 were tallied by police as "miscellaneous incidents" instead of crimes.

But Kennedy said that it is common in many cities to see police successes in reducing armed robberies or assaults, while the murder numbers remain stubbornly high.

"Homicide in particular turns out to be a different and far more volatile phenomenon than even broader violent crime," Kennedy said, "largely because homicide is committed by and against a very, very small portion of the population. Both victims and offenders tend to be highly, highly active criminally."

In New Orleans, however, the first murder of 2009 did not fit the profile of gangsters killing gangsters. On Jan. 2, Danny Platt, 23, allegedly killed his 2-year-old son, Ja'Shawn Powell, and dumped the boy's body at a Central City playground. Platt, who police said confessed to the crime, is currently facing first-degree murder charges.

In another high-profile killing, an elderly couple, Olander Cassimere Sr. and his wife, Alphathada Cassimere, were gunned down in their Pontchartrain Park home in May. Police later said they believed the killer was looking for a relative who planned to testify in an unrelated carjacking. An arrest has not been made in the case.

The 2009 homicide list includes shootings that actually occurred before the year started. For example, the killing of Cyril Roussel, 34, who was shot in August 2008 in the French Quarter, was marked up as a 2009 homicide because he died in February. Nathaniel Payton, 27, faces second-murder charges in the case.

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Laura Maggi can be reached at lmaggi@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3316.